Last week I was fortunate enough to attend the Nokia Games Summit in Monaco (see my LocoBlog) and I thought I would share a few highlights as I haven’t been able to blog much for a while. The summit mixed perspectives from publishers, developers, manufacturers and provided a wealth of information.  For me (and this is a very personal opinion) significant aspects were:

Presentation by Lincoln Wallen of EA who was discussing the development of mobile gaming and interestingly touched on many aspects that would have been perceived as Web 2.0. Indeed he seemed to be suggesting using gaming as an offering within the whole Web 2.0 lifestyle choice. This is something I would very much concur with and was delighted to see a company like EA considering these issues.

There was a good talk by Markus Huttunen and Kay Grunwoldt on Nokia next generation gaming offerings and indeed Markus came up with my favourite quote from the event in that we had a paradigm shift in console games when we moved from 3D to 2D and for mobile games this shift would be connectivity.

Mark Ollila of Telcogames gave a very good overview of there business and indeed shared many interesting perspectivies on there business strategies such as adopting the native OS development route.

Other interesting points that came out was that fact that there are huge amounts of mobile game players in Italy. Not sure why this is but may be worth looking into.

Possibilities for gaming offered by IMS which is a another of my research interests (so many cool areas but so little time).

I also got to handle an N95 which is very cool and if anyone reading this would like to supply me with one I would be very happy.

The summit ended with a panel discussion and the question I wanted to ask but didn’t was concerning multiplayer connected games. Given that games have a very short shelf life on portals do we need to adopt the practices of the gambling industry by seeding the games with players before launch to maximise the possibility of success? And if so who should pay for it?

Overall it was a very worthwhile couple of days and my apologies to those speakers not mentioned but all contributed to a great event.